Don't you find it weird that I don't really post about the operational stuff that my battalion goes through? The fact is that we do have them, but even when we are activated for them, I am not allowed to even breathe a word to another person. I am not sure about what happens after the whole thing is over, but the stance is that during operations, we can't talk.

The reason I am here blogging right now is that I am not involved in something that some people have been activated for. It is something quite big if people found out what it is, especially with the backdrop of terrorist activities around the globe. In fact, orders came so late that we had to postpone our book out timing to get things sorted out.

This morning my platoon went to Pasir Laba Camp to get briefed on our April trip to Taiwan to role-play as enemy scouts for one of the other units' ATEC (a sort of a final exam for all national service battalions before they finish active service and return to the civilian world): we were furnished with disembarkation cards to fill (which were printed in traditional chinese characters, something the whole auditorium had trouble reading, since we were more used to the simplified characters). I didn't know how the Indians and Malays in the room managed, but they had to fill the same thing in chinese characters (I wonder what they put under the "Name in Chinese characters" field — even I had trouble filling mine in traditional script; I just wrote it in the simplified form that I have always wrote in). As we know, certain things are sensitive to the Taiwanese, and probably the current political situation over there does not make them favour the simplified script at all (the simplified script is adopted by mainland China, and Singapore, while the Taiwanese retained the traditional form)...